The tens of thousands we inspected and the thousands to whom we gave first treatment may be just a splash in a huge puddle of disease. But the very careful instruction in treatment which we offered to planters, officials and missionaries (in fact to everybody whose heart was in the work of bringing back a failing population) might have been more important than anything else we did. I hope so. Month after month we had been hammering into the white man’s head the grave necessity for pollution-proof sanitary arrangements under conditions which varied between mushy swamp soil and solid rock.
CHAPTER VII
WHERE NEW GUINEA WAS NEW
Rounding the northern edge of the great island you come upon the Territory of New Guinea, which was German New Guinea until 1914, when Australia took it over. To simplify the confusion in a few words: the eastern half of the island is Australian-governed, divided into Papua and the Territory. The western half (roughly half) is Dutch New Guinea. That was how the land lay in 1921. Perhaps the horrors of the Second World War will change its geography again.
In May, 1921, when I boarded the Melusia, bound for Rabaul, the capital, our decks and cabins were thronged with seventy officials of the civil government, coming in to relieve a military government of evil repute. The newcomers were centered by the Administrator, Brigadier-General Evan Alexander Wisdom, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., V.D., whom his King later adorned with an added set of initials and a knighthood. Despite this alphabet train, General Wisdom had a character that went well with his name. He was an Australian Scot, veteran of Gallipoli and the French campaign. I felt that he was a man who could listen to reason and exercise his own. He needed all he had, for he was setting out to face a tangle which would have confused King Solomon.
The physicians he had brought with him for public health work were competently educated men, but inexperienced in tropical diseases. Colonel Honman, the new Chief Medical Officer, was another Aussie-Scot I didn’t forget in a day. A hard-crusted, soft-hearted old regular, all he knew about tropical medicine was what he had learned as personal physician to Prime Minister Billy Hughes. He wasn’t afraid of liquor or anything else. For seven months I was to be very close to Honman, and to love him for his contradictory qualities.
Aboard ship I had no sooner met him than he suggested that I give them a talk on malaria. I felt that here on the Melusia it might be of service to the incoming officials. That night they gathered on the main deck and I told them of my experiences with the disease. How the Anopheles punctulatus, whose female is more deadly than the male, travels in the Pacific with mankind in his restless journeying from village to village, from island to island. How I had run my fingers under the lower ribs of thousands of natives and felt the sagging spleen which tells the tale. I went into a subject which the medical men present knew as well as I did—through book knowledge: blackwater fever. This quickly fatal disease gets its name from the dark coloration of bloody urine, caused by the oxidization of hemoglobin, and the bladder condition is called hemoglobinuria.
I had found very few cases of genuine blackwater fever, I told them. Even when it occurs the patient is often dead before diagnosis. The condition, when it comes, is frequently caused by a blind misuse of quinine. Malarial people sometimes neglect the remedy for a couple of months, then swallow a handful. And here I tried to drive home my favorite point. I even had the temerity to quote a German; the world-renowned Dr. Robert Koch had come to New Guinea in 1910 and proved, for the first time in medical history, that epidemic malaria can be reduced by quinine alone. Here I took my chance to say that in fever-bitten countries quinine in regular moderate doses is an absolute necessity. Liquor is no substitute. If you abuse your constitution with a daily dozen bottles of beer or a habitual quart of whisky, don’t cry “blackwater fever.” A white man in the tropics can remain as healthy as in the temperate zones, provided he exercises and takes care of himself.
Wasn’t it Kate Douglas Wiggin who said, “It is hard to be agreeable and instructive at the same time”? However, most of the medical men seemed to like the talk. I heard one District Officer for the Admiralty saying, “This quinine business is all bloody nonsense.” Perhaps I had gone afoul of his prejudice. You can’t talk quinine without arousing some bitter criticisms.
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